HACKER Q&A
📣 _cmwh

Software Engineer career paths without on-call rotations


I've been in a FAANG size company for over a year as a full time engineer after university. Although the product isn't extremely interesting, I've enjoyed most aspects of my work except customer tickets.

For tickets we have both an on-call rotation every 2-3 months and a working hour ticket week every 3-4 weeks.

During these weeks, my stress levels skyrocket and I find that I honestly despise my work. I've identified a few reasons why I feel this way: 1) The customer issues have a sense of urgency which makes them stick to my thoughts even after work. I sleep worse and am less focused for the entire "on-call" period, no matter if it's working hours or not. 2) I hate interacting with customers.I'm an introvert with social anxiety and the customer interactions drain me. I do not let this show and power on during work, but tense feelings build up to pester the rest of my life. 3) I have observed that as seniority grows, dealing with customer problems and putting out fires out-places most of the programming activities I enjoy during my work. I would genuinely prefer being stuck 5km into a log every day trying to single out bit flips from cosmic radiation than interact with customers.

Due to being in the start of my career, I will work on handling this kind of work better. In the end however, I would like to explore if it's possible to avoid this experience entirely and move the tedious part of my next jobs to something more fitting to my personality.

My question then is, what kind of software engineer jobs do not include on-call and customer ticket handling directly? Ideally I'd want to interact with developers only or ad-hoc with customer facing roles and not as part of a regular schedule.

I was thinking about research engineer positions or perhaps internal tool development, where on-call does not make too much sense. I would assume it's in places where all the work happens asynchronously.


  👤 ghengeveld Accepted Answer ✓
Talk to your manager about it. If they're a decent human being they should be able to make it work for you. If not, then you're probably better off somewhere else (also because a manager should respect their people's wellbeing, if they don't then you shouldn't work for them).

👤 gregjor
I think developers on call is unusual. You probably got what we used to call “pager duty” because you’re junior. I can’t imagine a company putting senior developers on call. Most companies hide their staff behind call centers and ticketing systems.

The good thing about dealing directly with customers is learning how the product you work on gets used. There’s often a big disconnect between how developers and managers imagine people user the product and what actually happens. Plenty to learn from that.